Caught between desire and danger: power, agency and emotion work in American college women's heterosexual lives
View/ Open
Date
31/07/2021Author
Cooper, Chiara Elena
Metadata
Abstract
This empirical study, grounded in a feminist epistemology, analyses young, American college
women’s reflections on their heterosexual lives. The context of these women’s heterosexual
experiences provides a backdrop to explore how the phenomena of power, agency, and selfwork emerge through and interplay with heterosexuality. Building on existing research on
various aspects of women’s heterosexual lives (Fine, 1988; Holland et al, 1998; Tolman, 2002;
Jackson and Cram, 2003; Powell, 2010; Beres and Farvid, 2010; Wade, 2017; Pickens and
Braun, 2018), this study examines the ways that young women adhere to restrictive ideologies
which dictate rules as to how to be a traditionally feminine woman and how heterosex ought
to be experienced; but also how their accounts are able to, temporarily, rupture these oppressive
power structures, as the women critically consider their capacity for agency and freedom.
The study is based on 5 focus group interviews with 18 women at a large, southern public
university in the United States. This thesis explores how nuances of pleasure and danger as well
as agency and structure transpire through the young women’s narratives of heterosexuality,
building up a complex picture of their experiences. In extending a Foucauldian (1978, 1980)
understanding of discourse and power, this study will argue that the young women still have to
navigate pervasive heterosexual discourses which dictate appropriate heterosexual behaviour.
At the same time, this thesis critically analyses the women’s claims to sexual empowerment and
agency – which suggest there is some room for circumventing these discourses albeit only briefly
– from a feminist perspective.
Finally, this research draws on Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) conceptualisation of emotional labour
to argue that the young women engage in a form of emotional labour, or emotion work, in
order to maintain their heterosexual relationships and their emotions (and those of others) and
to manage certain sexual situations, including those involving questions of risk and safety. Thus,
this thesis addresses two interrelated problems that are prominent in the literature: the first is
that feminist theory aims to provide women the conceptual tools to understand their
heterosexual lives, but often either reduces their experiences to structural oppression or a vague
liberal view of empowerment. Neither of these fully grapple with the challenges and
opportunities for change that women face in heterosexual encounters. Secondly, the women
interviewed often rely on strategies based on linguistic interactions and emotion work to
manage their heterosexual relationships and a coherent sense of self. Women’s heterosexuality
as explored in this thesis is considered a complex contradiction; the study concludes that young
women are, on the one hand, able to articulate their sexual desires in an individualised sense
but that acting out these pleasures with a partner proves difficult, suggesting that progress of
sexual freedom remains intertwined with the intricate constraints of old.